Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-06-18-Speech-3-064"
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"en.20080618.2.3-064"2
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"Mr President, I should like to thank the honourable Members for all their very interesting contributions. Of course this is the right arena for a debate on democracy and respect for votes.
We need to understand better what the Irish said, what they are afraid of and what they hope for. I already understand from the preliminary results that this is not a general ‘no’ to Europe. It is also understanding and respecting their role in a European Union.
The upside of carrying out a referendum is that you also have to inform and communicate with citizens, with all the challenges that implies. I think that everybody can see that we also have to analyse what we can improve in terms of communication and information to citizens. I have always said that communication is a tool for democracy. This must be based on a right for citizens to know what goes on at European level, what is decided and how citizens can have a say. That work has to be further intensified and that is why also the Commission will continue with what we started a couple of years ago, called Plan ‘D’, as in Debate, Dialogue and Democracy. That will be based on the idea of having a citizens’ ownership of EU policies...
The Irish voted ‘no’, so why is it then not over? Why does the EU not just say, ‘The Treaty is dead: let us move on’? Why is it that some people and some Member States insist on carrying out their own ratification procedures? Why is it that we insist on coming back to the reasons why we started this whole debate on a new treaty for the European Union?
I hope you will allow me to say a few words about this because, do not forget, the European leaders have invested a lot of political capital in this whole procedure. It has taken a long time and a lot of energy to discuss the underlying issues and the problems behind the need for a new Treaty to design a new machinery for a European Union that has changed so dramatically in a short period of time.
Let me just mention three reasons why we think a new treaty is needed.
Firstly, it would give the Charter of Fundamental Rights legally binding force. Europe is not only about the internal market – as somebody said here – but also about the rights of persons and the rights of workers.
A second reason is, of course, that we would like to be able to speak with one single strong voice in the world, to be stronger on the international scene, and to do that on the basis of our values. We would like to stand up on the international scene, to fight for sustainable development, to discuss oil prices, conflict prevention and other important issues. This is one of the reasons behind the discussion on a new treaty.
The third reason is, of course, to make the European Union more democratic. How ironic it is, for those who talk about respecting the ‘no’ and about the outcome, that the Treaty would actually give more power to the directly elected European Parliament. It would mean more involvement of the national parliaments and would mean that the Council has to hold its deliberations in public, with the Citizens’ Initiative as one of the important elements in a chapter on participatory democracy, which is a new improvement in the Treaty.
The T-shirt party up there have the text ‘Respect the “no”’. My idea of doing that includes knowing the concerns of the Irish people. It is understanding why they voted ‘no’. They have made their own interpretations but I think it is very important that the Irish Government, with the help of our Eurobarometer opinion polls, can better understand what the concerns are and whether we can do something about them.
Is that not the idea of democracy? That is the way forward – to understand their arguments, to work with the other Member States and also to get their respect for the problems that we can, hopefully, solve together. As we did after the ‘no’ vote in the French and Dutch referendums, we have already carried out a Eurobarometer survey, which I think will also help better to understand the challenges of any referendum. Carrying out a referendum has its upsides but also its downsides – or rather, from a democratic point of view, challenges. After the voters have been presented with such a complex wide text as a new international treaty, of course there is room for different interpretations of the results."@en1
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